Recently, CCB spokesperson took an interview on the readjustment of service prices in the bank’s Hunan provincial branch. The price readjustment of the branch has drawn wide attention from the media.

According to the spokesperson, CCB in recent years has been committed to product innovation and service improvement and at the same time readjusted the prices of a number of services taking into account the costs of intermediary business within the framework of the Interim Measures for the Management of the Service Prices of Commercial Banks ([2003] No.3 of China Banking Regulatory Commission). Given the diversified situations in different regions, for some price readjustments, the primary branches are authorized to independently decide the execution time and floating range. To ensure the customers’ right to information and choice, the headquarters has required the primary branches to make announcement on such readjustments at least 10 days before execution in accordance with the No.3 decree. The announcement of the Hunan provincial branch is made just following the CBRC No.3 decree, the guidance of the headquarters and the real conditions of Hunan province. The readjustment involves a large number of old price items.

Concerning the online and telephone banking charges, as far as we know, the annual charges declared in the announcement of Hunan provincial branch are benchmark standards which have yet not been executed in practice. The reason to charge such services is mainly because the development and improvement of online and telephone banking in recent years gradually bring about value to our customers and at the same time the bank has made huge input which without appropriate compensation might influence our sustainable growth. Therefore, some Chinese banks have already started charging such services.

The spokesperson said that the original 1.0 version of personal online banking application officially adopted by CCB in 1999 has been upgraded to the 4.0 version and today’s online banking business offers more stable performance, faster speed, more diversified services and greater security. In fact, the charges on transactions completed via CCB’s online or telephone bank are still lower than those done over the counter. Taking the latest price readjustment of Hunan provincial branch as an example, the price of Swift Remittance service via online bank is set at 0.7% of the remittance amount with the minimum of RMB2 and the maximum of RMB35, while that over the CCB counter is set at 1% of the remittance amount with the minimum of RMB2 and the maximum of RMB50. It illustrates that the online and telephone banking services not only offer greater convenience but also more discount than counter services. We sincerely welcome our customers to use such new service channels.

Lastly the spokesperson noted that CCB values the attention of the media to the e-banking service price readjustment of its branch very much and will continue providing customers with the best products and sophisticated services. The media is welcomed to supervise the pricing behavior as well as services of CCB.